Day 34 - We'll cross that bridge when we come to it

We had booked a 10am walking tour of Porto and the train station was just outside our apartment which made it easy. We met the walking tour at bishops statue. Our walking guide was very entertaining filling us in on history and stories in a very millennial way. He took us past the bookshop where J.K.Rowling wrote the beginning of Harry Potter Philosophers Stone. The interior of the bookshop with it's intricate staircase coupled with the unusual robes that the local university students wore were a large inspiration for the books. The charge for entering the bookshop was 5 euro and the length of the queue was incredible, so we did not enter.

The sun was out and it was a beautiful day so we took the guide's recommendation to try a Porto Tonico over lunch looking over the Douro river. We then joined an hour's boat trip past the six bridges. Porto is a real mixture of way too many tourists clogging up the streets but if you glance up there are elderly people sitting on their balconys and neighbours washing hanging next door. It's unusual for locals to still be living in such a tourist hot spot, I wonder how much longer they have? 

We caught the train back to our apartment so we could collect our car to drive to Ponte de Lima to meet Jessica and Ricardo for dinner. We parked near the river and walked over the medieval/Roman bridge before Ricardo took us on a personalised walking tour of the pretty town. 

We saw the statue of the Roman General on one side of the river and all the soldiers lined up on the other. Ricardo told us the story of how the Roman soldiers refused to cross the river as they believed a fable that once they crossed it they would lose all of their past memories, so the General crossed the river and called them one at a time by name to prove he still had his memory.

Our dinner was huge, Mike and Ricardo shared half a pig (really just a pork knuckle) while Sue and K shared a massive fish. On our way back to our car there was a large group celebrating a local festival. Ricardo explained to us that it was a harvest celebration and a way for old people to teach the young the harvesting traditions. The music was lively as they danced a traditional dance that looked pretty easy but Jessica assured us that she had tried it and it wasn't as easy as it looked. There was a large tray at the back of a tractor full of slashed corn stalks, the older women were grabbing the stalks, ripping off the corn cobs and throwing them into a basket - all in time with the music.